TRENDING

Data General designs rackmounted, single-app server

By Florence Olsen

Apr 26, 1999

The rackmounted design of the AV 3704R server from Data General Corp. matches what the company sees as a growing user preference for multiple servers running a single Microsoft Windows NT application apiece.

The trend away from multiple NT applications on a single box coincides with user desires to avoid a single point of failure, said Lisa Robinson Schoeller, manager of product marketing for Data General of Westborough, Mass.

Each Aviion AV 3704R can have up to four Intel 450-MHz Pentium III Xeon processors. The 73-inch cabinet stacks up to nine servers. Data General offers configurations with 512K to 2M of Level 2 cache and up to 4G of RAM.

The AV 3704R has six PCI slots and one shared PCI/ISA slot. The cabinet comes with six internal hot-swap drive bays, two 5.25-inch removable-media drive bays, and CD-ROM and floppy drives. Tape bays can accommodate various media including digital linear tape, Schoeller said.

The rackmounted unit is the most compact platform for Data Generals preconfigured, pretested NT Server configurations: NT Cluster-in-a-Box, the same as Microsoft Cluster Server; and TermServer in-a-Box, which is Windows Terminal Server Edition.

As far as we know, were the only vendor that can build it completely preconfigured and tested in the factory and ship it intact to the customer rather than in multiple pieces, Schoeller said.

Data General supports Intelligent Input/Output peripherals in the AV 3704R, but the box components do not follow the Intel Corp. I2O standard for offloading CPU processing, Schoeller said.

One reason for the lack of I2O peripherals may be Intel itself, Schoeller said. The chip maker is building bigger and bigger CPUs so quickly that the CPU is no longer a system bottleneck.

Theres probably over time less and less need for I2O, even though it could bring further CPU bandwidth improvements, Schoeller said.

That would probably drive people down to smaller systems, because they could improve I/O capacity by offloading, he said.